Dirty Little Secret (15 page)

Marchant stared out into the thick fog, wondering if his boat was about to be mown down by a supertanker. The brutal sound of a ship’s horn had woken him from a restless sleep in the corner of the cockpit. Lakshmi was below. She was in a bad way, still recovering from her cold swim out to the buoy.

He couldn’t see anything on either bow, but he thought he could hear the sound of distant propellers above his boat’s diesel engine. Perhaps he was imagining it. But just as he began to relax, a deafening foghorn sounded again, closer this time. Christ, where was it? He must be crossing the shipping lanes. All he needed was a supertanker on autopilot, steaming through the Channel at 15 knots, crew asleep, bridge deserted.

He went down to the cabin, glancing at Lakshmi, who was shivering feverishly, barely conscious. She would need medical attention when they reached France, which would complicate matters. He had rung Jean-Baptiste, who was expecting him, but hadn’t had time to explain about Lakshmi. He turned on the VHF radio, tuning in to Channel 16 in case the tanker was trying to communicate. Silence. Beside him, Lakshmi moaned, her eyes still shut. They hadn’t looked right, the pupils dilated, when he had pulled her into the boat. He knew she was on medication for her arm. Had she accidentally overdosed? Had someone drugged her?

The foghorn sounded again. He considered letting off a distress flare, but the last thing he wanted was to attract the attention of the Coastguard. A Search and Rescue helicopter would be sent out to investigate, and he would be back in England before he had even left it.

Back in the cockpit, Marchant peered over the side and listened again, hoping the fog would clear. Then he heard the horn sounding for a third time, more distant now. Wherever it was, it had passed him. He checked the autopilot bearing and sat down, pulling the bobble hat over his eyes.

His tired mind turned to Salim Dhar, and how he had managed to get himself to Tarlton on a Search and Rescue helicopter. He would already be in Bagram. There was something about Dhar’s resigned manner that hadn’t added up, even taking into account the unfamiliar consumption of vodka and whisky. It was as if he knew he had to be captured if he were ever to be free again.

Marchant had heard about the jailbreak in 2005 that Dhar had mentioned. It was the only time anyone had ever managed to escape from Bagram. Various conspiracy theorists had pointed the finger at the CIA. Had a deal been done – four prisoners allowed to escape in return for four captured US soldiers? Had one of the prisoners, whose name was initially covered up, been a long-term CIA agent? Or were they ‘released’ so they could be killed, given that one of them was due to testify in America against a prison guard accused of torture?

Just as he was beginning to fall asleep, Marchant heard something else – this time it was the sound of a loudhailer. He thought he was hallucinating. Perhaps there had been no foghorn, and there was no one hailing him now. But there was, and the voice was getting louder.

A few minutes after the fireball had risen more than three hundred feet into the Welsh sky, a man walked briskly down the high-hedged lane in the far west of Cornwall. He was carrying a large, steel-lined briefcase. There weren’t many visitors to Skewjack, two miles from Land’s End, just the small team who worked at the cable station, which he was now approaching.

It was here that ‘FA-1’ and other crucial submarine fibre-optic cables linking America with Britain terminated after reaching land at nearby Porthcurno and Sennen. There were similar sites at Bude and Southport, but the man liked to think he had been assigned the most important. For it was at Porthcurno that one of the world’s first submarine telegraph cables had made landfall in 1870, linking Britain to Portugal and later to India.

He should have arrived an hour ago, but he had been held up by traffic on the drive down from Truro. For a moment he feared he might be too late. The award-winning building, with its low curved-steel roof that barely troubled the countryside, would be surrounded by armed guards. But as he turned into the entrance, heart racing, he was relieved to see that security appeared to be as low-key as ever: CCTV cameras and a secure main entrance.

It had taken a few months to be recruited by the firm that carried out maintenance at the site, but he had more than enough IT qualifications, and the call eventually came through. He was also from Bangalore, which he liked to think had helped his application: the company that owned the cable was Indian. The positive-vetting process was thorough, but nobody discovered his ‘missing month’ after he had left Bangalore University with a degree in computer science engineering. It was then that he had met Salim Dhar in a Kashmir training camp, offered up his considerable IT skills to the cause and been instructed to lie low as a sleeper in Britain until he was needed.

He had been on two maintenance visits to Skewjack before, once with his predecessor, and once on his own. The staff were always friendly to him, and today was no exception.

‘Oh, hi, Pradeep. Thought you’d forgotten us,’ Vicky said, getting up unnecessarily from her desk. She was the youngest – and prettiest – member of staff. Last time she had flirted shamelessly with him, and she seemed happy to pick up where she had left off. Perhaps they didn’t get many visitors this far west.

‘How could I forget you, Vicky?’ Pradeep said, managing a shy smile. He was content to play along with the charade, as it allowed him to confirm her mobile phone number. He would need it later.

‘Text me, promise?’ she said, after they had exchanged details. ‘Sometimes I make it up country, even as far as the bright lights of Truro.’

‘Sure,’ he said. In the interests of cover, he had texted her following his last visit: one message, rich in sexual innuendo. The next would be blunter.

After turning down an offer of tea, explaining that he was running late, he left the staff in the open-plan office to carry out what they assumed was routine maintenance in the main termination hall. It was here that the three-inch-thick FA-1 submarine cables – part of a £1 billion ‘figure of eight’ fibre-optic loop with Long Island in America and Brittany in France – connected with Britain’s landline infrastructure. There was also a connection to ‘FEA’, a fibre-optic cable that linked in thirteen countries from Britain across Europe to Japan. As the site’s manager liked to remind him, the capacity of its cables made Skewjack one of the largest-bandwidth communications stations in the world.

Twenty minutes later he had placed eight packs of PE4 plastic explosive as close to the cable housings as possible, linked to a phone-operated detonator. The blast would be enough to penetrate the steel wires, aluminium, copper and polycarbonate that protected the fibre-optics. He then said his goodbyes, unable to muster the smile he had arrived with, and walked back to his car. He had left it down the road to avoid the CCTV cameras.

Sitting in the driving seat, engine running, he pulled out an unused pay-as-you-go phone from the glovebox and texted Vicky, his fingers shaking. ‘This is a bomb warning. Your building is rigged with explosives. Not an exercise.’

Then he drove off towards Sennen as fast as he could. He would give them two minutes.

Images of the burning oil refinery were showing on the main screen in Denton’s office as he tried to tell James Spiro about the document he had found in his safe. Denton was at his desk, the photographs of torture in Guantánamo stacked neatly to one side. Spiro was pacing around.

‘This better be good, Ian. I’ve got Washington screaming down my neck telling us to pull out of this goddamn country altogether. Do we have to provide the security for your oil refineries too?’

‘I wish I could say it’s an isolated incident, but I fear it won’t be. The Salim Dhar backlash has begun.’

Denton also had people giving him grief. MI5, GCHQ and the Prime Minister all wanted answers about the terrorist attack, but his priority was to get the contents of Fielding’s safe into the open as soon as possible.

‘So what have you got?’ Spiro said as he sat down on the sofa, glancing at the TV screen. A few seconds later he was up on his feet again, pacing the room.

‘I found a document – more of a confession – written by Stephen Marchant.’

Spiro looked across at him, his interest piqued.

‘Fielding ran a Russian agent in the 1980s and 1990s,’ Denton continued. ‘Someone very high up in the KGB and later in the SVR.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Nikolai Primakov.’

‘He was one of yours? What the hell was he doing trying to recruit Daniel Marchant?’

‘I wish I knew. My predecessor kept the details of Daniel Marchant’s activities very much to himself. Need-to-know.’

‘You were his deputy, for Chrissake.’

Spiro had an uncanny habit of hitting raw nerves, Denton thought. Perhaps that’s why he had excelled at enhanced interrogation techniques.

‘What I do know is that the Russians were shielding Dhar,’ Denton said. ‘The only way we could get to him was by convincing Moscow that Daniel Marchant wanted to defect.’

‘They can have him.’

‘Primakov was the middle man. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t explain why Marchant didn’t eliminate Dhar when he was brought to him.’

‘Too damn right. And it doesn’t explain why he then got on a plane with him and starting bombing the crap out of GCHQ either. And that was after he’d shot down one of our Raptors.’

‘I think this document might help.’

Denton got up from his chair, walked around his desk and handed the sheet of paper to Spiro.

‘I’ll need it back. For safekeeping.’

Spiro sat back down on the sofa, falling unusually quiet as he began to read.

‘So, we were right all along,’ he eventually said. ‘Stephen Marchant, Chief of MI6, was handing over US-frickin’ intel to Moscow. And we officially pardoned the guy, wrote our suspicions out of the history books. They’ll need rewriting now.’

‘It would seem so,’ Denton said, taking back the sheet.

‘It kinda makes sense, though, when you think about it. I mean, look at his two sons: Daniel Marchant, the most treacherous officer ever to be employed by MI6 – and that’s saying something – and Salim Dhar. You couldn’t make it up.’ He paused, glancing again at the screen. ‘I wish someone’d put that fire out.’

As they sat in silence, Denton almost felt pity for Spiro. Some difficult conversations with Washington lay ahead of him. There was also the issue of Spiro’s wife, Linda, who had gone missing. Denton had never met her, but by all accounts she was a bit of a livewire who was currently having a mid-life crisis. Spiro had confided in him earlier. It had been a surprise to learn that they were still married. Denton had always thought Spiro was divorced, like him and practically every other intelligence officer he knew.

‘What gets me,’ Spiro said after a while, in a tone close to sober reflection, ‘is that Fielding defended Stephen Marchant last year, when we were throwing the book at the whole family, accusing the father, the son, of treachery. And there he was, knowing full well that Stephen Marchant had been a goddamn traitor all along. It’s institutional treason, that’s what this is, Ian. Where does this leave Fielding?’

‘In Moscow, as it happens. I just took a call from our station chief. Fielding arrived at Domodedovo airport on the 5 o’clock flight from Heathrow.’

‘You are entering a restricted military area. Please alter course now.’

The fog was thick and swirling. Marchant still couldn’t tell where the loudhailer was coming from, even though it had repeated its message several times.

‘I hear you, but I cannot see you!’ he called out, cupping his hands.

Then he saw it, a black rigid inflatable, approaching fast from the port bow. Two men in naval uniforms were on board, one of them waving at him to turn to starboard as he repeated his message over the loudhailer.

Marchant flicked off the autopilot and spun the wheel sharply to the right. There was no reason for them to suspect he was in a stolen boat, or on the run. He just had to do what they said and they would leave him alone.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t see you in all this fog,’ he said as the inflatable came alongside.

‘Forty-five degrees to starboard and you’ll be fine,’ the man replied. Marchant knew immediately that everything was going to be OK. There was no menace in the man’s voice, he was just doing his job.

‘Nothing about restricted areas on my chart,’ Marchant said, making a bit of a fuss. He was a proud sailor, he told himself.

‘It’s a routine naval exercise,’ the man said. ‘Keep on this bearing for ten minutes and then you can revert to your original course.’

Marchant was desperate to know more, but he resisted probing further. As the inflatable bore away to port and disappeared back into the fog, he wondered what sort of exercise it was. In his first month at Fort Monckton, he and the other new recruits had been taken out into the Channel to watch the SBS seizing control of a suicide container ship, packed full of explosives and ‘Hazard A’ cargo. Such exercises were becoming more common as the Olympics loomed on the horizon.

He turned on the ship’s radio to see if anyone was transmitting, but there was silence. Next, he scanned the airwaves on the ordinary radio until he caught the faint sound of a news bulletin. His hand froze on the dial as he listened to the newsreader:

So Dhar had been as good as his word. Marchant didn’t like the thought of Britain under attack. It was a personal affront. He had felt the same after 7/7, an acute mix of anger and failure. Fielding had once told him that success in the intelligence services was like anti-matter. It could only be measured by what hadn’t happened. Failure was solid, tangible, there for all to see.